'Mortal Kombat' retrospective: A bloody classic

The early 1990s was a game-changing era for the versus fighter, a period when the genre exploded into the mainstream and was shaped into what it is today. Classic brawlers like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat led the charge, and it was the latter that stole all the headlines in 1992.

Developed and published by the now-defunct Midway Games, the original Mortal Kombat debuted on arcades before being ported to virtually every home format that was around back then.

The game was essentially Midway's answer to the powerhouse that was Street Fighter 2, but it was a far different animal to Capcom's opus. For starters, the title was built on a more realistic graphics engine based on motion capture technology and was a far grizzlier affair.

Mortal Kombat was a quintessential one-on-one brawler in many ways, with the object of the game being no more complex than reducing your opponent's health bar to nothing.

The game's headline features were its unique five-button control system, and of course those bloody fatalities. Mortal Kombat's finishing moves ranged from heads being torn off to torsos being set on fire, and this level of brutality struck a chord with some and caused outcry among others.

Mortal Kombat was as gruesome as it got back in 1992. Blood gushed from fighters every time a blow was landed and gore drenched the arena whenever a successful fatality was pulled off.

The game was at the center of a series of public debates about violence in video games and its impact on society in the early '90s, headed up by Senator Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl.

With the backing of concerned parent groups and other public officials on their side, these talks were taken seriously, putting pressure on the games industry to introduce a rating system to ensure that software containing mature content was appropriately labelled. This led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

Controversy helped boost Mortal Kombat's sales, but the game deserved its success on merit alone. It was as challenging a fighter as any on the market, with mastering special moves and the blocking mechanic key to becoming a seasoned pro.

Mortal Kombat's focus on strategy combined with a memorable roster of fighters made it an instant classic. The likes of Scorpion, Liu Kang, Goro, Raiden and Sub Zero remain just as popular today, as much for their fleshed-out back stories as their trademark special moves.

Considering the high quality of the final product, it may surprise some to hear that the game had a development team consisting of just four people initially, and a development cycle of less than a year.

Midway wanted to push a Street Fighter 2 rival out onto the arcade scene, and they tasked programmer Ed Boon and designer John Tobias with achieving this within a short time frame.

Mortal Kombat began life as an action game featuring the digitised likeness of actor and martial artist Jean-Claude Van Damme, but the Kickboxer star dropped out due to his involvement with another video game that was ultimately never released.

Although the Muscles from Brussels was not directly involved in the game, the programmers paid homage to him with the character Johnny Cage - a Hollywood movie star who dabbles in fighting tournaments and has a penchant for punching opponents in the crotch, as Van Damme famously did in the film Bloodsport.

Mortal Kombat's success in arcades led to a series of home ports in 1993. The game arrived on four platforms initially - Mega Drive, SNES, Game Boy and Game Gear - all of which received it simultaneously as part of the Mortal Monday campaign.

The ports were something of a mixed bag, with the SNES edition arriving heavily censored and the handheld versions having to make major concessions due to hardware constraints. The most faithful home conversion was the PC edition, which arrived some time later.

The game's popularity endured and Midway capitalised on this with the release of sequels in the ensuing years. Hype around the series peaked around 1995 when Mortal Kombat was adapted for cinema by Paul W.S. Anderson.

Like most video game adaptations, it was a stinker, but one good thing did come out of the project. The Immortals provided a hard-hitting techno soundtrack that captured the game's adrenaline-fuelled battles well.

Mortal Kombat was exactly what the fighting genre needed in the early 1990s - a gritty alternative to Street Fighter 2 with the ability to match the Capcom brawler on the gameplay front.

There have been some forgettable sequels over the years but the decision by NetherRealm Studios - who inherited the development torch from Midway - to take the series back to its roots with the latest installment has helped it recapture some of its former glory.